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Friday, August 9, 2013

Life at the Homestead Part 1

It has been brought to my attention that through out my
posts I have mainly focused on the team and the trips we go on and the races we
run and that people would also like to hear about our unique lifestyle living
in a yurt off the grid with a bunch of huskies. So over the next few posts I am
going to try to give you a better look at just where the dogs and I live and
more importantly how we live.

Our kennel is located about 20 miles north of Fairbanks
Alaska on a beautiful forested hillside near the Chatanika River valley. We
choose to live “off the grid” or in other terms with out any outside wires
coming in. We also do not have any running water or plumbing. Our “restroom” is
an out-house which we use year round and at all temperatures warm or cold.

I currently haul all of our water by hand in five-gallon
jugs from a nearby spring. We use roughly 15-25 gallons of water a day so this
one chore can become quite time consuming. Despite the extra work hauling our
water the spring lets us enjoy some of the best tasting cleanest water Alaska
has to offer. On the brighter side not having plumbing means that we don’t have
to worry about pipes freezing or any of those other pesky problems that
plumbing in Alaska often brings.

We don’t live in a “typical Alaskan log cabin,” but instead
in ayurt. A yurt is in other
terms a glorified tent in the shape of a circle, which has a wooden frame and
fabric skin. Our only source of heat is a wood stove on which I do most if not
all of our cooking in the winter time. There is a bit of a learning curve to
cooking on the wood stove, but once you get it down it can be quite enjoyable.
I’ll post more about wood stove cooking at a later date.

In order to feed the wood stove we need a lot of firewood, I
split and stack our wood in the spring and summer so that it can dry for winter
time use. Trees naturally have alot moisture in them and it is important to
properly dry or season your wood to get the most efficient heat and burn time
from it. I plan to have over seven chords of wood split and stacked by the end
of August or mid September at the latest, and I am well on my way to reaching
that goal.

There are three main types of fire-wood in interior Alaska;
Birch, Spruce, and Aspen. Birch and Spruce are the most common, but we use all
three. Aspen burns fast and hot and produces a lot of ash in the process which
means you have to clean out your wood stove fairly often if not daily while
burning this easily obtained wood that grows through out the interior almost as
thick as weeds in places. Spruce also burns hot, and relatively quickly, but
not as fast as aspen. Birch in my opinion is some of the better firewood out
there for keeping your fire burning for a longer period of time. It is a really
nice semi hard wood that burns slower than aspen or spruce while still putting
off a good amount of heat. We really like to load up the stove with birch at
night and when we leave the yurt for longer periods of time during the day such
as training runs.

For our electricity our needs are simple and currently met
by a gas powered Honda 2000 generator. The generator powers a few lights in the
yurt and also charges our laptop computers for us from time to time. We try not
to run the generator every day and will often go a day or two between uses in
the winter time and some times up to a week in the summer. The generator will
power the power tools we need and is small enough to be easily transported
around the property to where ever it is needed at the time. One day we hope to
add a battery bank to the homestead for energy storage and maybe some solar
panels or wind turbines for alternative energy sources. And in order to use the internet I have to find a place in town with Wi-Fi, and that is the biggest reason these posts are often few and far between.

Well that’s enough for this post. I will post more on
gardening, the meat rabbits we raise, and other aspects of the homestead later.

Until next time, happy trails!

Here is a view of our Yurt, this picture was taken in mid April of this year.

Here is the yurt under construction, note the wood lattice structure.

Getting started on our wood for the winter.

A nice start to what will soon be several large woodpiles in preparation for the coming cold.

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